Homage: 2015
Subscribers get an exclusive preview of the completed homage to the Elemental Evil Player's Companion
I found out the other day that the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion is one of those products with a convoluted “origin story.” It wasn’t on the original release schedule for 2015 … in fact, it wasn’t on ANY release schedule. But through a strange mixture of circumstances, there ended up being a hole in the production schedule … and SOMETHING had to fill it. As luck would have it, there was a mostly-completed file of text AND an unused full-page of art that were lurking in the files looking for the right place to be useful … and the rest, as they say, is history.
Okay, that’s kind of a cleaned-up, “Hollywood-ized” version of what happened … but it’s basically how this product came to be.
Raymond Swanland’s cover image is moody and powerful … and it wasn’t until I started thinking about drawing an homage to it that I realized that I wasn’t REALLY clear on what was actually going on in it. (Kind of like I felt when doing my homage to the 1988 Greyhawk Adventures cover.) Is that guy an evil lord urging his minions on to attack his enemies? Or is he a heroic spellcaster about to be attacked from behind by a giant-eagle-riding enemy? And does it really matter? It’s still a super cool image!
The hardest thing about doing this homage was capturing the purplish-red light that Swanland bathed the scene in. I’m not a painter … or any kind of technically trained artist. I’m a cartoonist who usually sticks to the “regular” colors that we see in day-to-day life. But the art for this series has occasionally forced me to step outside of my comfort zone … and I always learn a lot when I do.
As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’re seeing this art before it is released for general consumption. You also have the option to buy an art print of this or any of the cartoon homages (and if you’re a paid subscriber, you get a discount on those purchases).
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